Holding our Soldiers Accountable

By dlindorff - Posted on 28 June 2010

By John Grant

The US Army is holding Specialist Bradley Manning incommunicado in Kuwait, under charges of leaking to WikiLeaks video of Apache helicopter pilots gunning down two Reuters cameramen and a number of Iraqis in a Baghdad neighborhood. The video is devastating in what it reveals about cold-blooded hi-technology warfare in a place like Baghdad. See it at: Collateralmurder.com

WikiLeaks has arranged for three pro-bono lawyers to assist Manning in his case. However, Manning must request for them to see him. Since the Army will not inform Manning of their existence, he cannot ask for them to see him. Joseph Heller would love it, a perfect Catch 22.

For me, Manning is an American hero, part of a strong tradition of soldiers who conclude in their conscience that they cannot morally remain silent on the nature of the war they have been sent to fight. One Iraq vet told me he lost confidence in the war he was fighting once he realized, in his attitudes and actions against the Iraqi people, he was becoming the tyrant he thought he was sent there to fight.

As there is a tradition of antiwar soldiers, there is also a tradition that seeks to damn people like Manning and keep their views far from the American consciousness.

In recent memory, this tradition starts with the image of antiwar protestors spitting on returning soldiers from Vietnam, a right wing myth that arose during the Gulf War as part of the effort to “get beyond the Vietnam Syndrome.” That’s the conclusion of Jerry Lembcke in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam.

Lembcke looked and could find no evidence at all of spitting. Instead, he says, the image was part of a concerted effort to demonize the antiwar movement and, especially, to distract national attention away from the many instances of returning soldiers and veterans who sympathized with the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War.

No one was actually spitting on our soldiers. Instead, pro war elements allowed their metaphoric imaginations to express their feelings about the antiwar movement with the spitting image. So it is not surprising someone like Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal dredged up the spitting image in his recent fraudulent posing as a Vietnam veteran.

Look up the documentary Sir! No Sir! to understand the fear the antiwar soldiers’ movement sent into the hearts of our leaders as the Vietnam War derailed. The fact this significant movement is little known shows how effective things like the spitting myth have been.

Ever since the rise of the spitting image, and especially beginning with the Iraq War in 2003, the antiwar movement in America has walked on eggshells when it came to distinguishing the war it opposed from the soldiers sent to fight it.
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